Florida Lifts Statute of Limitations for Arising Out of Child Abuse

Florida's Govenor, Charlie Crist has signed into law a bill (HB 525) lifting all limitations on civil and criminal actions arising out child sex abuse.  The organized opposition came from the Florida Catholic Conference.  The stated reason, the removal of the statute of limitations would create uncertainty for organizations like the Roman Catholic Church, according the reports in the Flordia press.  Here's a novel idea, don't abuse childrern, don't tolerate abuse of children, report all abuse of children.  Uncertainty vanishes, like the stain on the Church's clerical robes. 

Chicago's Father Przybylo Sues, Says He's Not a Child Molester, and Don't Read Anything Into the Payment of a $1.1 Mil to My Victim

The Chicago Tribune is reporting on the defamation lawsuit filed by Father Chester Przybylo, the former pastor of at a Polish Parish in a western Chicago neighborhood.  This is from the article by Cynthia Dizikes:

"A pastor of a west suburban church who was accused of molesting a 13-year-old Polish immigrant two decades ago filed a lawsuit against his accusers in Cook County Circuit Court on Friday, alleging they intentionally ruined his reputation.  [The priest .  .  .] was accused of molesting a 13-year-old Polish immigrant two decades ago filed a lawsuit against his accusers in Cook County Circuit Court on Friday, alleging they intentionally ruined his reputation.  The lawsuit comes about a month after the sex-abuse case was dismissed. It accuses the immigrant, his lawyers, and the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) of defamation, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. The Rev. Chester Przybylo, 59, is asking for at least $500,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

'It is a matter of clearing his name, setting the record straight,' said Przybylo's lawyer, Walter Maksym.  In 2006, Przybylo was accused of molesting the teen while serving at Five Holy Martyrs parish in Chicago in the late 1980s. The Chicago Archdiocese was named as a defendant.  Przybylo, who for the last decade has been pastor of the Shrine of Christ the King in Winfield, denied the allegations. The archdiocese settled with Przybylo's accuser for nearly $1.4 million.  But Maksym successfully moved to have the case against Przybylo dismissed in December based on an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that clarified the time frame in which sexual-abuse survivors can file lawsuits.

Przybylo is claiming that he 'suffered and endured acute nervousness, bodily pain and ruination and impairment of his reputation for honesty and integrity' because of the accusations and media attention. Barbara Blaine, president of SNAP, called the accusations 'frivolous' and defended the attention that her group paid to the allegations of abuse.  An attorney for the accuser stressed that Przybylo's case was thrown out based on a technicality and not on its merits."
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Disclosure:  I know and I have worked with Barbara Blaine.  She is a courageous lawyer, a social activist and one of the real  reasons priests and the Catholic Church are held to account for sex crimes against children not just in the United States, but all over the world.

Father Przybylo has just stupendously blundered, and the attorney who filed this lawsuit is going to rue the day he drank Father Przybylo's koolaid. 

Your archdiocese does pay a victim a million dollars+ away for no reason, had Father Przybylo actually been exonerated he would not be working a "shrine."  In my opinion, Father who skated on a "statute of limitation" defense is confusing a dismissal based on the elapse of time with being deemed exonerated.  Idiot! 

Here's what would not surprise me.  The archdiocese of Chicago is in the long drawn out process of "laicizing" or defrocking, Father Przybylo--who won't go quietly;  Przybylo is fighting the archdiocese's canon lawyers who are seeking to defrock him.  The civil lawsuit is part of his clerical defense.  Do not be at all surprised when Przybylo quietly dismisses the defamation lawsuit.   You see, when Przybylo filed this lawsuit and made allegations about his mental health, he opened himself up to "discovery" and suddenly every document in the hands of the archdiocese, every document in Father Przybylo's custody is suddenly fairgame in the defense of his accuser and SNAP.  Not only that, Father Przybylo is subject to being psychologically assessed by the expert of the each of the named defendants, depending on how many named defendants, Father can be required to attend and submit to multiple evaluations.  Father Przybylo will have to undergo deposition and answer all sorts of questions, that he apparently, thus far avoided by virtue of the statute of limitations defense. 

I'm not a fortune teller, but I predict that Father's little legal show will go away quickly and quietly.   It was ill-advised.

Fly Brains and Memory of Abuse, Part One

Yuck, Fly Brains!

The New York Times, Science Tuesday reported yesterday that: Researchers had implanted memories of trauma in the Brains of Fruit Flies, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/science/20fly.html?_r=1&ref=science. Ouch!

The nineteen-nineties featured a forensic debate about something labeled the “false memory syndrome”of FMS a pseudo-scientific invention of Peter J. Freyd, whose daughter had accused him of raping her when she was a child. Self-appointed memory experts like Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Ofshe ran around the country making a lot of money as “experts” advancing the non-scientific notion of memory implantation in the defense of lawsuits by brought by victims of child sex abuse. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome. Note, the adherents of the invented FMS are still at it--for a long time I received a newsletter from Freyd’s FMS foundation that operated a rapid response operation not letting any television or news report go unchallenged from their perspective, just check the “discussion” page at Wikipedia.

What’s involved?

Well, it doesn’t take a scholar of human behavior to see that adults frequently sexually exploit children. Can you say ROMAN POLANSKI? And surprise, surprise; normally credible people will leap to the defense of the adult! As this plays out in the family context can utterly blow your mind. The raped child is the perpetrator, the raped child is making it up—in more than one deposition I’ve taken over the years I’ve had family members who knew it was happening to a sister/daughter/grandchild/niece/cousin—tell me that the child “wanted it.”

Thank God for Roman Polanski because he illustrates an important point: crimes against children are not limited by social class, education, ethnicity, race, economics, or culture. Children have always been sexualized by adults, the evidence of which runs 24 hours a day on your television, the movies and advertising for clothes, cosmetics, and many categories of consumer goods.

So what is the context of the debate? Equally absurd is the forensic advancement of “repressed memory” –of which I have been labeled a primary proponent in the local and national press. While I believe repressed memory is a real psychological phenomena its use in court is ridiculous and to my mind fairly discredited. Repressed memory is the unconscious forgetting of past trauma. For instance, a victim of rape or violence does not remember the rape or the violence. Huh? How? Precisely, how does a person completely forget that they were raped or a victim of some traumatic violence? And why is this significant?

Well I don’t think the idea of that a victim of violence psychologically wants to forget the violence is all that difficult a concept to wrap your mind around, but how does this happen unconsciously?

Scientists who study this theorize that the brain can organically rewire perceptions of violent injury so that the victim can continue to function despite such horrors. There is considerable statistical evidence for the existence of this phenomena and I will discuss it again in this BLAWG at length—but for the time being let me illustrate the point. I personally had an accident where I fell from a cliff at a State Park. I fell, rolled, and tumbled some 200 feet down a steep ravine. While I knew this had happened, I could not explain the mechanism of the fall—for four years after the accident my memory of the moments immediately before the fall that would explain to me why the fall occurred were totally inaccessible to me. I’ve seen the same thing repeatedly over the years in litigation involving serious injury, the victim of the car, motorcycle; industrial accident is routinely unable to relate the details of what happened. How many times have you heard someone give an account of a violent accident saying I was driving along then the next thing I was waking up in a hospital bed—repressed memory.

Ok, I don’t want to go too long—let’s keep this entry at a readable length—repressed memory is important, forensically, because courts have held that civil and criminal prosecutions can proceed years after the period when a statute of limitations has expired if the victim did not discover the fact of their injury until they recovered their memory. You see? Repressed memory is also called “recovered memory” and the bane of Peter Freyd and the False Memory Syndrome proponents. They argue that repressed or as they call them recovered memories are "implanted" memories like the biologists are doing to the fruit flies. More on this topic

Some People Get Extra Due Process while Others Get None

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125544222770882429.html The US Supremes will hear Jeffrey Skilling's appeal from his criminal conviction. Skilling, one of Enron's "smartest men in the room" was convicted of 19 counts of financial fraud. He's represented by the great civil lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, best remembered for obtaining something lie a trillion dollar verdict from OJ Simpson in a civil wrongful death action.

While I don't begrudge Skilling his various days in court, compare and contrast with the young woman, Jamie Leigh Jones from KBR who spent 4 years trying to get the merits of her civil claim heard in court http://badlawyernyc.blogspot.com/2009/10/al-franken-gets-to-heart-of-it.html. Or the thousands of rape and child molestation victims here in Our Home State who can't get to court because of a 1 or 2 year statute of limitation that bars their claims agasint the Church. Some people get all the due process, some get none.